Natural wonders pull artisans to Tasmania

Date: February 11 2013

Scott Rankin

OVER recent decades, the green hinterland beyond the population centres of Tasmania has held an increasing allure for those working in the ideas, design, gourmet, boutique, arts, media, craft, speechwriter, viniculture, luthier, boatbuilder, environmental fields. The number of thinkers and doers moving to these wilder places has grown into an intriguing migration. Why? What about the distance, the diminished market, intermittent broadband, lack of collegiate peers, the whitewashing of indigenous culture?

For the homesick Tasmanian diaspora this muttonbird-like migration is understandable. For others it often starts with a holiday. Desire deepens when staring agog in real estate windows, making price comparisons between wage-slave city terrace, and ridiculously picturesque coastal allotments, where chickens and children frolic down green paddocks to the sea.

On one hand, Tasmanian creatives decry the unfair, ''nothing-ever-happens''-ness and race off to find fame, mentors and mind stimulants in world centres of urban excellence; on the other, established artisans are building quiet Tasmanian utopias. Is it sustainable? Will it reshape the economy, the ideas, the civil-fairness of Tasmania's future? Could this self-curated experiment assist the island state to shift from surviving to thriving?

One of the farthest places is the northwest coast. Scattered along a short stretch of picturesque coastal rind are tiny towns - Penguin, Preservation Bay, Sulphur Creek, Blythe Heads, Burnie, Cooee, Somerset, Wynyard, Boat Harbour. This mix of northern gaze, isolation, independence and relationship with the sea is what gives the northwest coast its distinctive feel and culture.

With globalisation and the ''flattening'' of the world, the coast is coming into its own. It faces into the clearest, brightest sunshine on the planet, with rain so free of pollution it is sold in New York for $20 a bottle. Tiny airports along the coast can whisk you to Melbourne in less than an hour. It is this northern aspect combined with the buffer of Bass Strait that makes the coast a dream lifestyle with its new, life/work practices. You make your own opportunity here. You look out over that horizon and follow your dreams. Kids have to leave the nest and come and go from the oyster of the world. That's a good thing, and it's one of the great privileges of island life.

Nationally, arts and culture generate a similar slice of GDP as agriculture. Tasmania has long been a food bowl, so perhaps this bodes well, two economies working together - a food bowl for thought. In the language of government arts administration this would be perfect for the ''Tasmanian brand''. However, branding becomes self-defeating when it attempts to harness arts and culture. Brands exist to motivate purchase and manipulate loyalty. The lack of authenticity in branding works against the spontaneous pull that Tasmania is currently enjoying.

Culture is not primarily about commodity. When impatient arts policy discussions merge with tourism discussions, they mistake the cultural process and try to manipulate it, to help drive the economy. Ultimately this kills the process, diminishes the art and stunts careers.

What Tasmania has, precisely because it is so small, is the chance to defeat this stultifying way of thinking. There is simply not enough arts clout in government to do much damage, so the organic cultural process continues to happen haphazardly, almost magically.

How lucky for Tasmania that MONA bubbled up, almost unhindered by government, nestled in unlikely Glenorchy, run by the class-clown who gambles for a living and collects classy art/porn, pays for it himself and doesn't feel like he is owned by anyone? Would this lovely eccentric boutique museum/playground have happened if government-funded or arts policy-driven? Not a chance.

Culture is the whole of life, it is the flow of time and ideas and practice, in which we live and breathe, while reflecting on the past and inventing the future. It creates the rich soil on which society thrives. This independence, non-interference and under-the-radar activity in Tasmania is also driving the artisan migration. Hopefully we can avoid the branding, bad policy, and bean counting, and let this utopia thrive.

Scott Rankin is a writer/director and the creative director of Big hART. He lives and works from the northwest coast of Tasmania. This is an extract from his essay in Griffith Review 39: Tasmania - The Tipping Point?

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